The Adobe Books Backroom Gallery opened Valley a show of local Shalo P's new works on paper (through Dec 2nd). To get to the gallery, you have to go through the entirety of a bookstore, but this is a really great journey. The center of the store has a few couches, on which a lot of people were gathered and the first thing I noticed was the strong sense of community. These people weren't standing and having superficial conversations like at a lot of art openings, they were piled together with loving and deep connections between them.

As you stepped into the Backroom Gallery, which is demarcated by a small sign above the doorway, the ambiance was noticeably quieter, but people were still gathered closely when looking at specific works. These were all works on paper, with figures morphing in and out of one another, often in sexual relations and with hedonistic violence. This is a teenage boy's wet dream, but is much more complex than that. Because they were displayed on mostly yellow and white notebook paper, with a few on plain white, and because most drawings involved a fair amount of small text, viewers were really spending time with the work. It ranges from pen doodles to sharpie drawings, and the thickness of the lines in the works were very consciously decided. The column of sex drawings would not have worked had it been in sharpie, the pen allowed a more gentle approach.

The pieces which looked more like computer-generated drawings didn't really fit with the rest of the works displayed, although they referenced the small comic book that Shalo P also had on sale that night. These books are very nicely printed and I would like to buy one to spend some more time with these drawings. I don't know that I am finely attuned to his Robocop references, but I can feel the passion spilling out of the pages, which makes the work both endearing and inviting. However, I will make the disclaimer that once invited in, you may see some X-rated images, so don't bring the kids.

San Francisco artist Shalo P (our interview w/ him) opens his first solo show VALLEY at Adobe Books this Saturday Nov 10th. Don't know a whole lot of what to expect, but if this and the images he emailed us is any indication, it should be interesting indeed.

VALLEY is an ensemble of supple relationships, a climax of virtualization. Drawings, hand-drawn and digitally rendered, elucidate an affair with one SISTER SPREAD. Disconcerting, challenging, stimulating still images. As the eyes move over them, reception is comparable to the sensing movement of our consciousness, jumping back and forth between the various layers of reality, between past and present.

Shalo P is a SF based audio-visual artist who recently exhibited a selection of 14 drawings at Ever Gold Gallery coinciding with the recent release of his self-published “LOVE IS SUCH A DANGEROUS GAME”. The zine, containing work created in a two year period chronicles memories, longing and catastrophic situations in post-modern copy/past collage fashion. They're meticulously wild drawings and really deranged ones at that. The zine comes in two limited versions and are available at the Ever Gold as long as supplies last. It's an absolute gem, so make sure you get yourself a copy. It’s probably the best $8 I’ve ever invested. -Alex Braubach

AMB: I’ve known you since our school days at SFAI and had plenty of opportunities to see your work evolve in the past years. It’s really interesting to see how you have developed from "The Tormentors" paintings you exhibited at Meridian Gallery years ago to what your up to with your video-based performances at New Langton and elsewhere. Your current show at the Ever Gold is an exhibit of drawings. It’s like you’ve come full circle with “Love Is Such A Dangerous Game”. Please describe your current work, the drawings, and how they relate to your previous work.

SP: The work is a barrage of symbols and signs. It’s dense stuff that also seems fit to just be “in the moment”, not only as some mutilation of the bizarre nature of things but also embracing the ways of seeing to varying degrees. You know, as drawings, comics strip and other visual forms. My current works are like celebrations to living at the start of a very weird age.

My conceptual framework hurtles into these different directions and they always seem organic and mine. I’m producing floorshows and farewell concerts with the FRIENDSHIP FRIENDS FOREVER (rainbow band), making videos under the TELEVISION FOR GHOSTS / 2084 FLOORSHOW umbrella, and making images that relay the totemic themes behind all the other work. I shuffle around in formats but the big difference is how close they are to me, personally.

Before I moved to SF I was just a writer, and words just made so much sense to me. Then they seemed phony, manipulative and limited in a world with hypertext in it, a world with so much goddamn subtext to what was lurking under in it’s big storm of changes, in its unconscious birthing of memes. Words were meaningless in the face of the connections between them, in the changing face of how books were produced, in the questions concerning the changes in information retrieval itself. This was big to me - the new ways of experiencing “stuff”, from how we communicated these changes to the part that images play with culture and memory. So I went from writing dialogues to making data maps.

Then I got into imagery again, especially the Medusa, the representation of the incomprehensible. That’s what got me into The Tormentors – relationships - the walls between things breaking down. It was car crashes. Have you ever seen one? It's like that Raymond Carver story "Popular Mechanics", it's a raw moment of chance and horrible corrupted beauty. Things change irrevocably. Well, the drawings... They're my landscape of these feelings - the innate vile beauty of car crashes, the taste of sweat, the medusa's gaze, sexual fantasies, self representation, time and memory - that whole gag. What's the personal side of a good sinner?

I don't think at this point it needs to be written since the last update to Fecal Face was a long time ago, but...

I, John Trippe, have put this baby Fecal Face to bed. I'm now focusing my efforts on running ECommerce at DLX which I'm very excited about... I guess you can't take skateboarding out of a skateboarder.

It was a great 15 years, and most of that effort can still be found within the site. Click around. There's a lot of content to explore.

I'm not sure how many people are lucky enough to have The San Francisco Giants 3 World Series trophies put on display at their work for the company's employees to enjoy during their lunch break, but that's what happened the other day at Deluxe. So great.

When works of art become commodities and nothing else, when every endeavor becomes “creative” and everybody “a creative,” then art sinks back to craft and artists back to artisans—a word that, in its adjectival form, at least, is newly popular again. Artisanal pickles, artisanal poems: what’s the difference, after all? So “art” itself may disappear: art as Art, that old high thing. Which—unless, like me, you think we need a vessel for our inner life—is nothing much to mourn.

Hard-working artisan, solitary genius, credentialed professional—the image of the artist has changed radically over the centuries. What if the latest model to emerge means the end of art as we have known it? --continue reading

"[Satire] is important because it brings out the flaws we all have and throws them up on the screen of another person," said Turner. “How they react sort of shows how important that really is.” Later, he added, "Charlie took a hit for everybody." -read on

NYC --- A new graffiti abatement program put forth by the police commissioner has beat cops carrying cans of spray paint to fill in and cover graffiti artists work in an effort to clean up the city --> Many cops are thinking it's a waste of resources, but we're waiting to see someone make a project of it. Maybe instructions for the cops on where to fill-in?

The NYPD is arming its cops with cans of spray paint and giving them art-class-style lessons to tackle the scourge of urban graffiti, The Post has learned.

Shootings are on the rise across the city, but the directive from Police Headquarters is to hunt down street art and cover it with black, red and white spray paint, sources said... READ ON

We haven't been featuring many interviews as of late. Let's change that up as we check in with a few local San Francisco artists like Kevin Earl Taylor here whom we studio visited back in 2009 (PHOTOS & VIDEO). It's been awhile, Kevin...

If you like guns and boobs, head on over to the Shooting Gallery; just don't expect the work to be all cheap ploys and hot chicks. With Make Stuff by Peter Gronquist (Portland) in the main space and Morgan Slade's Snake in the Eagle's Shadow in the project space, there is plenty spectacle to be had, but if you look just beyond it, you might actually get something out of the shows.

Fifty24SF opened Street Anatomy, a new solo show by Austrian artist Nychos a week ago last Friday night. He's been steadily filling our city with murals over the last year, with one downtown on Geary St. last summer, and new ones both in the Haight and in Oakland within the last few weeks, but it was really great to see his work up close and in such detail.

Congrats on our buddies at Needles and Pens on being open and rad for 11 years now. Mission Local did this little short video featuring Breezy giving a little heads up on what Needles and Pens is all about.

Matt Wagner recently emailed over some photos from The Hellion Gallery in Tokyo, who recently put together a show with AJ Fosik (Portland) called Beast From a Foreign Land. The gallery gave twelve of Fosik's sculptures to twelve Japanese artists (including Hiro Kurata who is currently showing in our group show Salt the Skies) to paint, burn, or build upon.

Backwoods Gallery in Melbourne played host to a huge group exhibition a couple of weeks back, with "Gold Blood, Magic Weirdos" Curated by Melbourne artist Sean Morris. Gold Blood brought together 25 talented painters, illustrators and comic artists from Australia, the US, Singapore, England, France and Spain - and marked the end of the Magic Weirdos trilogy, following shows in Perth in 2012 and London in 2013.

San Francisco based Fecal Pal Jeremy Fish opened his latest solo show Hunting Trophies at LA's Mark Moore Gallery last week to massive crowds and cabin walls lined with imagery pertaining to modern conquest and obsession.

Well, John Felix Arnold III is at it again. This time, he and Carolyn LeBourgios packed an entire show into the back of a Prius and drove across the country to install it at Superchief Gallery in NYC. I met with him last week as he told me about the trip over delicious burritos at Taqueria Cancun (which is right across the street from FFDG and serves what I think is the best burrito in the city) as the self proclaimed "Only overweight artist in the game" spilled all the details.

Ever Gold opened a new solo show by NYC based Henry Gunderson a couple Saturday nights ago and it was literally packed. So packed I couldn't actually see most of the art - but a big crowd doesn't seem like a problem. I got a good laugh at what I would call the 'cock climbing wall' as it was one of the few pieces I could see over the crowd. I haven't gotten a chance to go back and check it all out again, but I'm definitely going to as the paintings that I could get a peek at were really high quality and intruiguing. You should do the same.

The paintings in the show are each influenced by a musician, ranging from Freddy Mercury, to Madonna, to A Tribe Called Quest and they are so stylistically consistent with each musician's persona that they read as a cohesive body of work with incredible variation. If you told me they were each painted by a different person, I would not hesitate to believe you and it's really great to see a solo show with so much variety. The show is fun, poppy, very well done, and absolutely worth a look and maybe even a listen.

With rising rent in SF and knowing mostly other young artists without capitol, I desired a way to live rent free, have a space to do my craft, and get to see more of the world. Inspired by the many historical artists who have longed similar longings I discovered the beauty of artist residencies. Lilo runs Adhoc Collective in Vienna which not only has a fully equipped artists creative studio, but an indoor halfpipe, and private artist quarters. It was like a modern day castle or skate cathedral. It exists in almost a utopic state, totally free to those that apply and come with a real passion for both art and skateboarding

I just wanted to share with you a piece I recently finished which took me 4 years to complete. Titled "How To Lose Yourself Completely (The September Issue)", it consists of a copy of the September 2007 issue of Vogue magazine (the issue they made the documentary about) with all faces masked with a sharpie, and everything else entirely whited out. 840 pages of fun. -Bryan Schnelle

Jeremy Fish opens Hunting Trophies tonight, Saturday April 5th, at the Los Angeles based Mark Moore Gallery. The show features new work from Fish inside the "hunting lodge" where viewers climb inside the head of the hunter and explore the history of all the animals he's killed.

Beautiful piece entitled "The Albatross and the Shipping Container", Ink on Paper, Mounted to Panel, 47" Diameter, by San Francisco based Martin Machado now on display at FFDG. Stop in Saturday (1-6pm) to view the group show "Salt the Skies" now running through April 19th. 2277 Mission St. at 19th.

For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to quit my job, move out of my house, leave everything and travel again. So on August 21, 2013 I pushed a canoe packed full of gear into the headwaters of the Mississippi River in Lake Itasca, Minnesota, along with four of my best friends. Exactly 100 days later, I arrived at a marina near the Gulf of Mexico in a sailboat.

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